LAST year, two of the most talked about technologies were social networking and service-oriented architecture. This year, the trend that is expected to be dominant is unified communications.

Analysts reckon that telephony and e-mail have been the key foundation of enterprise communication while other applications such as conferencing/collaboration, instant messaging and mobility are seeing growing adoption in the region.

In the past one or two years, there has been a trend of migration from point products to an integrated suite of collaborative communications, integrating enterprise communication tools such as telephony, conferencing, e-mail, online shared workspaces, document management and instant messaging with presence awareness to form a unified communications infrastructure.

The continuing pace of globalisation, coupled with the growing influence of China and India as economy powerhouses, are generating a need for communication solutions in the Asia-Pacific that can seamlessly span distances and time zones.

Enterprises will need to review their needs and provide a strong set of communication/collaboration tools to employees to address additional communication requirements within different areas of their business.

Enabling unified communications with presence awareness within organisations will ensure higher employee productivity and also potentially strategic benefits in customer/partner communication when it is integrated as part of the key business processes.

Another trend that enterprises should look out for is IT security. Security will increasingly become a critical issue for most enterprises, especially those facing regulatory compliance pressures.

While most enterprises

already have some basic security infrastructure in place, there are other key areas such as end-point security and data security that have not received as much attention. Having these areas covered will enable enterprises to achieve a layered security architecture, which is critical for meeting regulatory compliance demands, protecting the business infrastructure against new threats and securing intellectual property and data.

Speech self-service and speech analytics are other trends that enterprises can expect this year.

Speech applications are expected to revolutionise the contact centre and customer service industry. Speech-based interactive voice response takes human speech as input and uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies to deliver a new customer experience.

Using ASR and TTS, the speech analytics engine can be used for word or phrase detection (such as the use of competitor names or products) as well as root-cause analysis. Such a system is expected to improve the quality of the monitoring process and help enterprises benefit from customer feedback and inputs.

Finally, ICT spending will continue to be crucial among enterprises this year. It’s an investment that will help them stay in business and stay competitive both locally and abroad.